Are we a free people anymore? We were told ICE would begin seizing illegal immigrants who were convicted criminals, MS-13 members, drug dealers, murderers, human traffickers and people of that ilk. We wondered how there could be 12 million such people who needed to be deported as Trump claimed during his campaign. Maybe these were some of the illegal immigrants who were eating the dogs and cats of the residents in Springfield, Ohio.
Now, we are witnessing immigrant farm workers, students, factory workers and assorted individuals without criminal records of any kind, being arbitrarily arrested by masked operatives and removed to foreign prisons without charges and no means of family or legal protective help.
Now, cities that don’t demonstrate active assistance in these arbitrary ICE arrests are being threatened with withholding federal funding. City and state authorities are being put in the position of aiding and abetting the arbitrary arrests and deportation of innocent individuals as if these people are slaves. We’ve seen large numbers of men chained, hands and feet and sent to prisons with no civil or human rights assured. Thus, local authorities are being dragged into these unlawful acts of US government fascist authoritarianism.
Even as horrified wives and mothers protest the unproven charges against their sons and husbands, families are being broken up and administration officers are having to acknowledge that many detainees are no more dangerous convicted criminals than the masked ICE agents themselves. At least some of these government agents are themselves convicted criminals in the January 6th assault on the US Capitol. Certainly, few if any of these illegal immigrants have been convicted of 34 felony counts and assault against a woman.
Yet our Republican Party senators and representatives are silent on these vile, arbitrary assaults on individuals. Conservative Republican journalists ignore the subject as if its routine in American society.
If the old adage that “If one of us isn’t free, then none of us are free” is true, then we are already living at the start of a fascist, authoritarian state. If any government agent(s) can arrest anyone off the street without legal representation simply because of their color or foreign language, America has fallen back into the pre-Civil War era. ICE agents are the equivalent of slave catchers who used the Fugitive Slave Act to demand the assistance of otherwise unwilling individuals and groups. If you don’t aid and abet, you are also guilty.
Until this cancer on the face of America is removed, none of us is truly free. We are no longer a country of free men and women. America is descending into an enemy of world democracy, willing to abandon Ukraine and our European allies. Trump initiated a devastating worldwide trade war with huge tariffs. Our federal deficit is likely to balloon by $3-4 trillion with massive tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% of the population. We have threatened to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal and control the Gaza Strip into a “Riviera of the Middle East”. Millions of average Americans will lose their Medicaid and Medicare benefits. Social Security is on the chopping block and that loss will devastate many millions of highly vulnerable Americans of that into which we have already paid.
The Republican-controlled Congress aids and abets Trump along with the Supreme Court as part of the Bill of Goods known as Project 2025, aimed at the dissolution of American democracy into an oligarchy.
When I think about those American soldiers’ graves at Normandy and other locations around Europe and Asia, it sickens me to think so many abased, deluded Americans would support Trump under these circumstances. Worse yet, the Republican legislators who ignore their oaths of office to defend the US Constitution and the Supreme Court majority who hand a convicted felon like Trump the legal power to break the law in pursuit of their mutual philosophical goals, are unworthy. They have abandoned the very thing all those good men suffered and died to preserve.
They support this scoundrel of a man so he can place a massively larger portion of our country’s wealth in the hands of a few. Now he can arrest and deport virtually anyone at will. Are we a free people anymore?
Somehow, the 4th of July has a very different feel in 2025.
Dominic Terrone
Oxford
Bob Kopec says
You wondered how there could be 12 million immigrants that need to be deported because Trump said so?
All Trump does is lie repeatedly. CNN and Washington Post fact checking teams reported that he told over 23,000 lies during his second run for the W.H. That number must now be over 30,000.
Eva M. Smorzaniuk MD says
O’er the land of the not-so-free and the home of the not-so-brave……….Is this how we have chosen to be defined as Americans?
Michael Davis says
Thank you, Mr Terrone,
The midyear elections are a long ways away. Until then Trump and Republicans will continue to bully and assault powerless people. Equally important they are making American weaker by destroying our medical and scientific infrastructure. As Trump kisses the American Flag, the biggest winner of his Big Beautiful Bill is China. I wonder how many MAGA voters thought they were voting for China to take over world leadership roles from the United States.
Those of us who hope the United States remains the greatest nation on earth need to constantly keep yelling about how Trump and his thugs are destroying it. It’s a 24/7 job because the authoritarians won’t rest until democracy in America is dead. Every day brings new evidence. For example, today the jobs report issued by the labor department has been proven to be false and misleading. Yesterday he called Putin and immediately afterwards, Russian unleashed a large attack against civilian targets in Ukraine. Thanks to Trump, none of our democratic allies trust the United Staes anymore.
So, please keep on writing. Now is not the time to relax. Many others in our community are writing and speaking as well. Our freedoms cannot be sustained until Republicans are sounded defeated in 2026.
Susan E Kemp says
AMEN 😢
trudy wonder says
Than you for your letter, Dominic. I’m with you – this year I don’t feel much like “celebrating” the Fourth. But I do honor it, as a reminder of what it took to establish our much-revered independence, and what it will take to re-establish and maintain it.
Benjamin Franklin himself warned of this, as he spoke at the Constitutional Convention at which 39 delegates symbolically signed the Constitution.
“In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government, but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered; and believe further, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government.”
Most of us are more familiar with Franklin’s more succinct response to Elizabeth Willing Powel’s question: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
“A republic, if you can keep it.”
Source: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/constitutionalconvention-september17.htm
Darlena Joy Roesti-Butler says
well said! Thank you for your eloquent words.
Anne C Stalfort says
Excellent letter.
Wilson Dean says
Excellent article. This July 4th we are witnessing the exact opposite of the ideals upon which this country was founded.
Bishop Joel Marcus Johnson says
Thank you, my friend. The vile specter of sadism is overtaking our country, when elected members of Congress humorously dismiss the pending crisis and deaths of our ill and old with the reductions in Medicare and Medicaid, and their loss of health insurance; and around the world with the millions dying as a result of the abolition of USAID and our food and medical care. And now, even the Supreme Court of The United States has approved of the cruel and unusual punishment of flying undocumented aliens, a small percentage of them with records, to the desert sands of South Sudan. And just today, we have witnessed the President of the United States joking, in character, about our new tent concentration camp for aliens in the Florida Everglades, aptly named Alligator Alcatraz. Alas, this fog of evil is not new. Freedom has given license to those with hatred in their hearts.
Jonathan West, (USMC, Ret.) says
I am proud to be an American. I still believe we have the greatest. Country on earth.